Top colleges may not be as out of reach for high-achieving, low-income Latinos as they think. In fact, they may be more affordable than second-tier colleges and universities.
“‘The Missing ‘One-offs’: The hidden supply of high-achieving, low income students’ published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, discovered that the vast majority of low-income, high-achieving high school students are not only shortchanging themselves by not applying to those colleges and universities considered to be among the best in the nation but are cheating themselves out of available financial aid,” according to an article published by LatinaLista on NBC Latino.
According to the study’s authors, the selective colleges usually offer so much financial aid to high-achieving, low-income students that the students pay less to attend it versus attending a “far less selective or non-selective post-secondary institutions,” LatinaLista reported.
The article asked how students did not know about these schools. For starters, according to the study, low-income students are most probably in schools where they never meet anyone who went to a selective university. Their college fairs probably don’t bring in or attract recruiters from the top colleges out of state.
The sad reality, as exemplified by this study, is that these high-achieving, low-income students exhibit behavior typical of their income, rather than their achievement, the study concluded.